Friday, May 18, 2018

UWP Tip #19 - The Windows Community Toolkit

We take a quick break from our UWP Community Toolkit tips series because the toolkit has been given a new name this month! The UWP Community Toolkit is now called the Windows Community Toolkit.

The new name is a reflection of the renewed focus of the project - enabling Windows developers to quickly build awesome applications for Windows 10. The scope of the toolkit will be broadening to encompass controls, components and helpers for UWP, WPF, WinForm, Xamarin.Form and more. Long story short, if you are building for Windows and can consume a .NET Standard library, the Windows Community Toolkit aims to help you succeed.

The next major update of the toolkit (v3.0) is coming soon. If you take a look at the milestones on GitHub, there's a code freeze for 3.0 on May 23rd and the target date for the release is May 30th. I see some interesting features in the list of issues for this release including a dark theme for the sample app and an InfiniteCanvas control.

Go check out the announcement on the Windows Developer Blog from earlier this month to get all the information about the name change. As soon as the new release is out, I'll be back with some more tips and tricks for using the new controls and helpers.